Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability

Trans*

AMERICAN STUDIES NOW: CRITICAL HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez

Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative, e-first books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson

2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige

3. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, by Jack Halberstam

Trans*

A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability

Jack Halberstam

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2018 by Jack Halberstam

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Halberstam, Judith, 1961– author.

Title: Trans* : a quick and quirky account of gender variability / Jack Halberstam.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017028209 (print) | LCCN 2017030891 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-520-96610-9 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-520-29268-0 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-520-29269-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Transgender people—Social conditions. | Gender identity—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC HQ77.9 (ebook) | LCC HQ77.9 .H35 2018 (print) | DDC 306.76/8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028209

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Maca

CONTENTS

Overview

Preface

1. Trans*: What’s in a Name?

2. Making Trans* Bodies

3. Becoming Trans*

4. Trans* Generations

5. Trans* Representations

6. Trans* Feminisms

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

Notes

On Pronouns

Works Cited

OVERVIEW

1. TRANS*: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Traces the historical legacies of categorization and classification as they pertain to the transgender body, with a focus on the importance of naming and un-naming. Classification systems connect with colonial strategies for knowing and governing.

Pathologization•Legacies of Classification•Representation

2. MAKING TRANS* BODIES

Surgeries both make and unmake trans* bodies. Not all trans* people have surgeries; not all surgeries are successful; some trans* people participate in the global market for cosmetic surgical tourism.

Surgery•Bodily Architectures•Theories of Embodiment

3. BECOMING TRANS*

Trans* children are the new frontier for rights, recognition, and medical intervention. This has favorable and unfavorable consequences for trans* activism.

Trans* Child•Parenting•Trans* Defined

4. TRANS* GENERATIONS

Trans* kinship across generations has been important in the past, but currently parents have stepped into the role of elders to younger generations of trans* teens. This has the unfortunate impact of cutting trans* children off from trans* history itself.

Generational Struggle•Houses•Kinship

5. TRANS* REPRESENTATIONS

Representations of trans* people in film and on TV have tended to portray gender variant bodies as mad, bad, and dangerous. This changed in the 1990s when we saw a slew of films that addressed real struggles in trans* lives. Currently, new generations of trans* activists contest older films in favor of positive images, with sometimes disastrous effects.

Cross-Generational Connections•Queer Energy/Anger•Representation

6. TRANS* FEMINISMS

Feminisms and trans* activisms have historically been cast as opposed, at odds, in conflict. The conflict is undeniable and radical feminist critiques of trans* women have done serious damage, but it may be time to look for grounds for collaboration and solidarity.

Feminism•Trans* Feminism•Solidarity

7. CONCLUSIONS: MAKING AND UNMAKING BODIES

What can The Lego Movie tell us about building new worlds, about architecture, and about trans* relations to bodies and selves?

Trans* Architecture•Legos•Elements•Piece of Resistance

ON PRONOUNS

How to play fast and loose with pronouns.

PREFACE

You’ve got your mother in a whirl

She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.

David Bowie, Rebel, Rebel (1974)

I started writing this book the day that David Bowie died. I found it strange to feel so sad about the loss of a person I had never met, but Bowie for me, as for so many people, represented the possibility of stretching beyond social norms and hackneyed cultural forms of expression and generic expectations. He embodied a deeply seductive and intelligent version of popular culture and managed to wed subversion to accessibility, rebellion to credibility, and transformation to performance. Over the course of a long and varied career in music and performance, David Bowie was able to sustain, with considerable vigor, a meaningful and lasting relation to musical experimentation, and he was able to articulate those experiments through bodily gestures and a series of ambiguously gendered personae. It is no accident that David Bowie’s appeal, and many of his lyrics, were explicitly futuristic. His own gendered appearance—part man, part woman, part space alien—spoke of forms of life that extended far beyond the everyday understandings of men and women that circulated in the 1960s and 1970s when he began his journey into pop stardom.

Bowie is a perfect figure for the kinds of experiments in gender and embodiment that concern me in this book. Rather than giving a neat, chronologically ordered account of the emergence of transgender communities and trans visibility in the twenty-first century, I want to chart the undoing of certain logics of embodiment. When logic that fixes bodily form to social practice comes undone, when narratives of sex, gender, and embodiment loosen up and become less fixed in relation to truth, authenticity, originality, and identity, then we have the space and the time to imagine bodies otherwise.

Only a few months after Bowie’s unexpected demise, another celebrity death shocked the world. Prince, the purple provocateur from Minneapolis, died too young of a drug overdose. Like Bowie, Prince had pioneered a gender-bending style that both emphasized his virtuosity and uniqueness and brought out a queerness, or sexual excess, and a transness, or gender ambiguity, that exceeds simple divisions between gay and straight or trans and cis and that offered access to complex, polyrhythmic worlds of love, lust, apocalypse, and heartbreak. Prince, a favorite icon for drag kings in the nineties and a figure so unclassifiable that for a while he refused a name and instead was known by a symbol, combined an authoritative ability to improvise and innovate with a playful tendency to flirt and seduce. For performers like Prince and Bowie, the opposing tendencies that our culture has placed in separate boxes were easily conjoined on behalf of, often, otherworldly productions of identity.

The sign that Prince used for a while to stand for his performance persona, a symbol commonly known as the love symbol, combined the signs for man and woman. Prince used the symbol in an effort to part ways with his record label, Warner Bros., which, he felt, was exploiting him and his music in a way that could be called, he said, slavery.¹ By using an unpronounceable symbol, Prince felt that he could interrupt the label’s plan for squeezing the maximum amount of profit out of his work. By calling attention to the unjust ownership of Black music by white-run labels, and by recognizing that this ownership of Black culture extends through the gender-stabilizing insistence on naming and classification, Prince refused to obey the laws of gender, genre, or generic marketing. In his music, too, Prince sidestepped conventional gendered performances, and he inhabited a vocal range that veered abruptly from low growls to falsetto trills. Shifting and switching between styles, voices, soul, funk, rock, and punk, Prince likewise represents the gendered complexity to which, in the realm of popular culture, audiences are already attuned.

So, let Bowie and Prince, as well as Anohni or Jayne County, represent the kind of histories that gather under the sign of Trans*. It is not a matter of whose gender is variable and whose is fixed; rather, the term trans* puts pressure on all modes of gendered embodiment and refuses to choose between the identitarian and the contingent forms of trans identity. With the ghosts of Bowie and Prince as our guides, we will go where trans* takes us, looking not for trans people (or people who have legally changed their sex) but for a politics of transitivity. Let’s look at forms of gender, idioms of gender, gender practices and ask all the while how gender shifts and changes through all bodies and how it might be imagined in the future. In short, and as befits both of these eclectic performers, let’s dance.

ONE

Trans*

What’s in a Name?

Whatever is not normative is many.

Eileen Myles, quoted in Ariel Levy, Dolls and Feelings (2015)

Over the course of my lifetime I have called myself or been called a variety of names: queer, lesbian, dyke, butch, transgender, stone, and transgender butch, just for starters. Indeed, one day when I was walking along the street with a butch friend, we were called faggots! If I had know the term transgender when I was a teenager in the 1970s, I’m sure I would have grabbed hold of it like a life jacket on rough seas, but there were no such words in my world. Changing sex for me and for many people my age was a fantasy, a dream, and because it had nothing to do with our realities, we had to work around this impossibility and create a home for ourselves in bodies that were not comfortable or right in terms of who we understood ourselves to be. The term wrong body was used often in the 1980s, even becoming the name of a BBC show about transsexuality, and offensive as the term might sound now, it at least harbored an explanation for how cross-gendered people might experience embodiment: I, at least, felt as if I was in the wrong body, and there seemed to be no way out.

Today, young people who cross-identify are able to imagine themselves into other bodies, bodies that feel more true to who they are. And as times change, as medical technologies shift and develop, we also struggle to name the new right-ish bodies that emerge while continuing to work around the wrong bodies that remain. This chapter sifts through the changing protocols and rubrics for bodily identification over the past hundred years and asks, simply, what is in a name?

Many a great novel begins with a name or identification of some sort—Call me Ishmael.¹ Or, My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.² But also, As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.³ And of course, I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate—at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement.⁴ Names establish character, lead into events, and create expectations. To be sure, there are also novels that begin in the absence of names: I am an invisible man and Where now? Who now? When now?⁵ These non-naming flourishes challenge the idea of character and raise questions about the ability of naming to capture all the nuances of human identification. Indeed, one of the most lovable children’s cartoons of all time, Finding Nemo, features a friendship between a clownfish, Nemo, whose name means nobody in Latin, and a blue fish, Dory, who can barely remember her own name from one moment to the next.⁶ The confusion that both Nemo and Dory sow leads not to a cozy lesson about who we really are but in fact makes the argument for learning to be part of a group, in part by challenging proper names. I offer these examples to make sense of the powerful nature of naming—claiming a name or refusing to and thus remaining unnameable. Indeed, this book uses the term trans*, which I will explain shortly, specifically because it holds open the meaning of the term trans and refuses to deliver certainty through the act of naming.⁷

In a contemporary context, it is hard to imagine what it may have felt like to lack a name for one’s sense of self. But only a few decades ago, transsexuals in Europe and the United States did not feel that there was a language to describe who they were or what they needed. Christine Jorgensen, heralded by historian Joanne Meyerowitz and others as America’s first transgender celebrity, wrote a letter to her parents in the 1950s telling them that in her nature made a mistake.⁸ And in Radclyffe Hall’s infamous novel about inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928), the female-born protagonist, who calls herself Stephen, anguishes about her identity. Her governess, also an invert, tells her in a magnificent speech,

You’re neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you’re unexplained as yet—you’ve not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don’t shrink from yourself, but face yourself calmly and bravely. Have courage; do the best you can with your burden. But above all be honourable. Cling to your honour for the sake of those others who share the same burden. For their sakes show the world that people like you and they can be quite as selfless and fine as the rest of mankind. Let your life go to prove this—it would be a really great life-work, Stephen.⁹

Hall used the term misfit for herself and called her hero, Stephen, an outlaw as well as an outcast and an invert, the word used in the early twentieth century in Europe and the United States to describe people in whom gender identity and sexual instincts have been turned around, such that a female-bodied person desiring another woman would be considered a male soul trapped in a female body